iShares U.S. Medical Devices ETFIHI

The iShares U.S. Medical Devices ETF (IHI) is a wrapper masquerading as a theme, hawking exposure to the future of healthcare while quietly tracking the Dow Jones U.S. Select Medical Equipment Index, a club of 46 constituents whose combined market value is roughly the operating scale of a mid-sized hospital group.

What matters isn’t the marketing-BlackRock’s glossy pages promise AI-enabled breakthroughs-but the boring basket: firms like Intuitive Surgical, Stryker, and Medtronic whose products are more likely to appear in an operating theatre than on a TikTok feed. The index rules are public, the holdings are public, and the fee is public: 0.42% per year, which is less than the co-pay on some pacemaker procedures but compounds like one over decades.

SEC filings show IHI’s annual report lands on EDGAR like clockwork, listing holdings and cash flows with the same bureaucratic precision as a hospital’s quarterly service charges. The fund reconstitutes annually, meaning the Dow Jones committee decides who stays and who exits based on float-adjusted, market-cap-weighted math-no manager discretion, no heroic stock-picking, just index alchemy. The portfolio’s top weightings skew to surgical robots and imaging machines, sectors that thrive on procedure volume, reimbursement policy, and the fact that humans occasionally break themselves.

Liquidity is healthy but not heroic: 120k shares traded daily on Nasdaq, enough to keep the bid-ask tight but not enough to absorb a panic exit without a small price wobble. FINRA’s fund analyser confirms the 0.42% fee is all-inclusive; no hidden 12b-1 charges or redemption tricks, just the quiet extraction of 42 basis points each year. The wrapper’s job isn’t to relative strength-it’s to deliver the index minus the fee, which is the ETF industry’s version of a round-trip economy ticket.